Читать книгу Coin Collecting For Dummies - Neil S. Berman - Страница 32

We give the U.S. Mint a lot of credit for a job well done. It reintroduced the Susan B. Anthony dollar, created and marketed the incredibly popular Sacagawea dollar, came up with 40 new quarter dollar designs in eight years, and worked around the clock to strike billions and billions of coins so that we can go out and spend them. As coin collectors and dealers, we owe a debt of gratitude to the U.S. Mint for doing something I’ve been trying to do for decades: getting people interested in numismatics.

I don’t say that mints are perfect. In fact, I acknowledge that the U.S. Mint is far from perfect. But as far as numismatics goes, imperfection is a good thing. Few industries have product lines in which the rejected items are more valuable than the perfect ones. Bad light bulbs get thrown away, imperfect clothing is sold as seconds, and defective washing machines sell in classified ads. None of them fetches a premium — certainly not the tens of thousands of dollars that some coin errors have brought.

In 2000, several spectacular error coins stunned the numismatic world. One such error was a coin with the front of a 50 State Quarter and the back of a Sacagawea dollar — the first U.S. coin ever to bear two denominations. Because the two dies differ in diameter, no one believed that it was possible for such an error to exist; in fact, some professionals believe that these error coins were made deliberately. The error received tremendous publicity in the national media, causing millions of noncollectors to begin examining their change. You can bet that many of them have become coin collectors.

Error coins not only capture the essence of the manufacturing process but also one’s curiousity. More recently, an error on the strike of Lincoln Presidental Dollars omitted some edge lettering, which catapulted this coin to sell for as much as $500, depending on condition.

The Fred Weingberg Collection, known as one of the greatest modern day collections of U.S. mint errors, highlights a 2000-P Sacagawea dollar/Washington Quarter mule — one of the rarest mint errors — and a 1880-S Morgan dollar, graded MS63 by PCGS and struck 40 percent off center. Both of these coveted mint error coins are expected to capture a premium sum at a Heritage Auction in 2022.